A Cultural Semiotics of Jingshen: A Manifesto

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-534
Author(s):  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Hongbing Yu
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
New Age ◽  
Mental Capacity ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
I Ching ◽  
Cognitive Space ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
Sign Relations ◽  
Eastern Philosophies

AbstractIn the face of myriad crises in modern societies, semiotic inquiry has many valuable contributions to make. However, the long-standing dominant analytical paradigms in the field have made it exceedingly difficult, if not altogether impossible, to tackle the countless unanalyzable aspects of semiosis in the human condition. What needs to be done in semiotics is to highlight another mode of knowing, synthetic thinking, without excluding the analytical mode. Drawing inspiration and strength from classical Eastern philosophies and aesthetics, notably I Ching and Laozi, as well as classics and advances in global semiotics, the present paper proposes a cultural semiotics of jingshen, understood here as the holistic flux of mind, vitality, and creativity. This route of inquiry seeks cogent coalescence of the two foregoing modes of knowing so as to better inform semiotics in a new age. At the same time, it creates a unique methodology: the fusion of revelatory “embodied cognition” and “cognition via knowledge/ abstraction.” Viewed in this light, the purpose or function of semiotics is not limited to understanding signs and sign relations or uncovering laws governing the evolution of semiosis, but more importantly it embraces the improvement of mental capacity, the expansion of cognitive space, and the liberation of human thinking.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Neurofilmology of the Moving Image

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano D'Aloia
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Perceptual Psychology ◽  
Contemporary Cinema

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

The human right to health and the struggle for recognition

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK HAYDEN
Keyword(s):  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
World Health ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Treatment Action Campaign ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Right ◽  
Struggle For Recognition

AbstractPersistent health inequalities exist globally, affecting high-income countries and blighting the developing world. Health inequalities currently are one of the greatest challenges facing realisation of the human right to health. This article argues that the struggle for the right to health in the face of such inequalities requires embracing three critical considerations: redistribution, representation, and recognition. While the analysis of the right to health has been formulated predominantly around theories of distributive justice, I suggest that a more normatively compelling account will link the politics of economic redistribution to the politics of sociocultural recognition. A recognition approach, which views rights claims as grounded on the vulnerability of the human condition, can show how rights are emergent in political action and that the ability to claim and exercise the human right to health is contingent upon recognition of diverse sociopolitical statuses. From this perspective, there are no ‘neutral’ constructions of the rights-bearing subject and conflict between different political framings of the right to health is a consequence of the struggle for recognition. This theme is illustrated by comparing conservative, affirmative, and transformative processes of recognition in the struggle for access to essential antiretroviral medicines by South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign.

scholarly journals Evolutionary convergence and biologically embodied cognition

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 20160123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred A. Keijzer
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Philosophy Of Biology ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Evolutionary Patterns ◽  
Mental Context ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Nervous System Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Convergence

The study of evolutionary patterns of cognitive convergence would be greatly helped by a clear demarcation of cognition. Cognition is often used as an equivalent of mind, making it difficult to pin down empirically or to apply it confidently beyond the human condition. Recent developments in embodied cognition and philosophy of biology now suggest an interpretation that dissociates cognition from this mental context. Instead, it anchors cognition in a broad range of biological cases of intelligence, provisionally marked by a basic cognitive toolkit. This conception of cognition as an empirically based phenomenon provides a suitable and greatly expanded domain for studies of evolutionary convergence. This paper first introduces this wide, biologically embodied interpretation of cognition. Second, it discusses examples drawn from studies on bacteria, plants and fungi that all provide cases fulfilling the criteria for this wide interpretation. Third, the field of early nervous system evolution is used to illustrate how biologically embodied cognition raises new fundamental questions for research on animal cognition. Finally, an outline is given of the implications for the evolutionary convergence of cognition.

The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 108-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rozin
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractAlthough North American undergraduates represent about 0.2% of humanity, and a very unrepresentative subset, they actually provide an advance look at what humanity is becoming. In the face of globalization, this is all the more reason to study the wonderful variants of the human condition before they become homogenized.

scholarly journals El reconocimiento de la dignidad humana ante los avances de la genética

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisela Giner Rommel
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
The Face ◽  
One Step

La llamada era o siglo de la biotecnología, y con ella, una nueva realidad genética artificial, va abriéndose camino inexorablemente. La misma supone nuevas formas de dominio de la vida natural y humana sin precedentes. El hombre puede ya alterar nada menos que el curso de la evolución de las especies. Es fácil adivinar entonces por qué la genética traspasa su propio ámbito científico: se encuentra ineludiblemente cargada de dilemas éticos de toda índole, y unida al mundo filosófico y moral por su urgente necesidad de respuestas. La primera gran reflexión que la genética plantea a la ética es de tal calibre, que zozobra los cimientos de la propia tradición filosófica occidental y su concepción de la dignidad humana. Si el hallazgo del genoma humano lleva consigo una propensión de la visión de la realidad humana exclusivamente cientificista y biológica, procediendo a realizar una verdadera «sacralización de la ciencia» ¿Supone ello el derrumbe, la invalidación de la condición ética y libre del hombre? ¿Debemos renunciar a una visión del mismo como un ser digno y reducirlo a un animal más? ¿Debemos, en definitiva, dar carpetazo al humanismo, poniendo en tela de juicio la calidad moral del hombre? ¿Cerrar entonces los espacios de la ética o la filosofía, declarando que todos los aspectos que encierran la condición humana se consumen en una explicación científica? ¿Cómo afrontar otros posibles ataques a dimensiones de la dignidad humana como la libertad, la igualdad, la intimidad? ¿Precisan de disciplinas distintas, como la filosofía y el derecho, en busca de soluciones que exceden del campo científico y a los que éste no puede dar respuestas? Ante los nuevos poderes y responsabilidades que trae consigo el progreso científico, la explicación ética y la científica no deben sino reencontrarse. Apostar por el control ético del rumbo del proceso científico y tecnológico a través del paradigma de la dignidad humana se torna imprescindible. En definitiva, tratar de llevar a cabo el sueño del progreso universal, real, en el que la genética constituya un eslabón, un peldaño más en su consecución efectiva no puede darse sin intervención de la reflexión ética.This is definitely the age of biotechnology and with it comes a new artificial genetic reality. Biotechnology gives us never seen before control over plant, animal and human life. Mankind may now even be able to change the course of evolution in all living creatures, no less. That is why it is easy to understand that the science of genetics transcends its own domain; it is unavoidably confronted with ethical dilemmas of all kind and it is compelled to turn to philosophy and morality because of its need to find answers urgently. The first question raised by genetics is of such a magnitude that it overturns the basis of the Western philosophical tradition and its concept of human dignity. If the decoding of the human genome leads to an exclusively scientific and biological vision of human reality, to what you could call a «sacralisation of science», then what happens to free will, to man as an ethical being? Should we henceforth refuse to consider Man as a creature of Dignity and reduce him to just another animal? Should we, in short, abandon all humanistic idealism and question even the morality of human beings? Should we forget about ethics and philosophy and agree that all the aspects, implicit in the human condition, can find a scientific explanation? But how then should we deal with other attacks that may be made against such dimensions of human dignity as liberty, equality and privacy? Will there be no need for other disciplines, such as philosophy and law, to find solutions to problems which exceed the field of science and for which science has no answers to give?. In the face of all the new powers, potential and responsibilities brought about by scientific progress, ethics and science should not become adversaries. Ethical control over the course of scientific and technological progress based on the paradigm of human dignity is becoming essential. To summarise, it will be impossible to realise the dream of true progress, in which the science of genetics is but one step, without answering ethical questions.

Rodney Needham

Anthropology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Hard Rock ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Blind Spots

Rodney Needham (b. 1923–d. 2006) was a brilliant and daring anthropologist, possessed of considerable imagination and theoretical sophistication; a facility for languages, both European and Asian; and a broad-ranging comparativist outlook that transcended his immediate specialisms in Borneo and Indonesia. He enjoyed a keen sense of the historical depth of anthropology as a way of looking at the world, and a sharp awareness of the discipline’s wrong-turnings and recently acquired blind spots, though also a generous desire to recover the insights of those unsung but ingenious pioneers who were overlooked in the conventional canon of the discipline, for which Needham had scant regard. Needham was utterly original, as all who encountered him on the page or in person were soon aware, and did not foster a school. Indeed, he seemed to repel rather than woo potential allies. Needham was involved in several biting academic feuds with fellow anthropologists, and there is a significant roll call of anthropologists with whom he broke a lance. There was a major falling-out with Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom Needham was for a time an acolyte and—as translator and practitioner of structuralism—the Frenchman’s most zealous missionary in the anglophone world. But things went spectacularly awry, and the reason is to be found in the temperaments of both men. For Needham was not the only English anthropologist of his generation—Leach was another—who, while finding structuralism persuasive, was to experience exasperation and disillusionment with the French master’s evasiveness in the face of uncomfortable ethnographic fact and error. Needham’s own positive contributions to the discipline were rich and multifarious, sometimes arresting. He remained unconvinced about aspects of the human condition that other anthropologists cavalierly took for granted, such as the notion that “belief” was a universal ingredient of mental life. Rather, Needham was persuaded by an accumulating mass of ethnographic evidence that certain modes of classification were intrinsic to the human mind. This was the point of departure for his anthropological project. The structuring capacity of the human mind came close to the elusive hard rock on which a robust discipline might be built.

Essays in Analytic Theology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Rea
Keyword(s):  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Face ◽  
Part Deal ◽  
The Human Condition

This book is the second of two volumes collecting together the most substantial work in analytic theology that I have done between 2003 and 2018. The first volume contains essays focused, broadly speaking, on the nature of God; this second volume contains essays focused more on doctrines about humanity, the human condition, and how human beings relate to God. The essays in the first part deal with the doctrines of the incarnation, original sin, and atonement; the essays in the second part discuss the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a theological problem that arises in connection with the idea God not only tolerates but validates a response of angry protest in the face of these problems.

The futures of ‘us’: A critical phenomenology of the aporias of ethical community in the Anthropocene

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091651
Author(s):  
Rasmus Dyring
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
The Face ◽  
Critical Phenomenology ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
American Nation

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community.

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